I saw Shannon Wheeler at Wordstock last spring and asked him about this. He said he was really excited about it. I listened to a preview of the music on a CD player he had at his table. The segment I heard was a slow part, so I can't say I have much of an opinion about the music. Maybe the sets and the plot will be interesting.

He also had a copy of the libretto, and the part I looked at seemed a bit repetitive. Of course, maybe that's what I think about opera...

9/20/06

Takashi Hashiyama, president of Maspro Denkoh Corporation, an electronics company based outside of Nagoya, Japan, could not decide whether Christie's or Sotheby's should sell the company's art collection, which is worth more than $20 million, at next week's auctions in New York.

he resorted to an ancient method of decision-making that has been time-tested on playgrounds around the world: rock breaks scissors, scissors cuts paper, paper smothers rock.

I like the strategy from Chisties' experts ... the international director of Christie's Impressionist and modern art department twin 11 year-old girls.

"Everybody knows you always start with scissors," she added. "Rock is way too obvious, and scissors beats paper." Flora piped in. "Since they were beginners, scissors was definitely the safest," she said, adding that if the other side were also to choose scissors and another round was required, the correct play would be to stick to scissors - because, as Alice explained, "Everybody expects you to choose rock."

9/14/06

This puzzle is pretty cool. I didn't get much past level 8.Don't ask me for hints...

The text is always written in a clear form, it's just disguised in some way. There are no riddles or such things. The text is always located within the image file. It's never a reference to a place outside this website! This puzzle is case sensitive

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The U.S. military did not count people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks when it reported a dramatic drop in the number of murders in the Baghdad area last month, the U.S. command said Monday.

The decision to include only victims of drive-by shootings and those killed by torture and execution, usually at the hands of death squads, allowed U.S. officials to argue that a security crackdown that began in the capital August 7 had more than halved the city's murder rate.

But the types of slayings, including suicide bombings, that the U.S. excluded from the category of "murder" were not made explicit at the time. That led to confusion after Iraqi Health Ministry figures showed that 1,536 people died violently in and around Baghdad in August, nearly the same number as in July.

This almost makes me nostalgic for the Cold War. Where is the next source of banned information? The Arab world, or the US?

Owing to the lack of recordings of Western music available in the USSR, people had to rely on records coming through Eastern Europe, where controls on records were less strict, or on the tiny influx of records from beyond the iron curtain. Such restrictions meant the number of recordings would remain small and precious. But enterprising young people with technical skills learned to duplicate records with a converted phonograph that would "press" a record using a very unusual material for the purpose; discarded x-ray plates. This material was both plentiful and cheap, and millions of duplications of Western and Soviet groups were made and distributed by an underground roentgenizdat, or x-ray press, which is akin to the samizdat that was the notorious tradition of self-publication among banned writers in the USSR.